An ongoing edible adventure

30 December 2009

Quite the time to be in Hyderabad. The city's in a bit of kerfluffle. Separatists are lobbying for the state of Andra Pradesh to be split into two states. Maybe three.

Depending on how adventurous you're feeling (I'm not), you can wander into downtown hotpots hotspots (thanks CurryPuff!) to watch separatist demonstrators. Apparently there will be hordes of them, regardless of the side of the argument. Some will tell you India is a very politically passionate country. Others will tell you the demonstrators are poor people hired for the day to wear the appropriate colours and hold the appropriate banners and chant the appropriate chants. The most hardworking ones among them apparently stagger their engagements so that they can work for one party one day and another party the next.

"Nothing is what it seems in India," people keep telling me. I can't tell if they're warning me or feeling smug.

The more annoying part of all these political theatrics is the separatists strong-arming the city's merchants to go on strike. That is, goondas (hired gangsters) roam the city, making sure businesses have their shutters shut. Or else.

So the boys can't get their shirwanis (long Indian shirt-coats) tailored today, and the henna hasn't yet been delivered to girls' bridal henna session.

But nothing here is what it seems.

At various food purveyors, it's worth checking in with the security guard in front of the shutters. Sometimes, you'll be shown the side or back door, in through the delivery entrace, the storerooms, the prep rooms, kitchens and plating areas, into the establishment where it's business-almost-as-usual. (The sights enroute are a good way to test if you still want to eat there. Maybe all restaurants should be made to admit customers this way.) A network of lookouts send word by text message if the goondas are on the move.

This is how we got brunch from a well known city bakery today. We came home smug with a pile of chicken croisssants, chicken cutlets, chicken drumsticks and coffee cake.

The buttery croissants and moist mashed potato cutlets were chockful of pulled chicken, more generous that what I've seen in any other commercial establishment.

The drumsticks, on the other hand, were just a chicken legbones with chicken-leg-shaped patties of mashed potato, breadcrumbs, onions and masala. And maybe some chicken flavouring.

29 December 2009

Thank you to all of you who have spent time with Babs and me here, following our shenanigans, contributing your comments, reactions, encouraging words and ideas, and being patient with all my typos and experiments during this blog's infant phase.

Please forgive the recent silence. We spent the last week and a bit in Bangalore, India, not at all to celebrate Christmas. Rather, Babs's Mum (a native Bangalorean) organised a belated wedding reception for Babs and me, his brother and his Chicago-born Indian wife, and his sister and her Polish husband -- all visiting India for the first time since getting married over the last 18 months.

The ~400 guests -- considered small by Indian wedding standards -- hailed from Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Kerala, Mumbai, Delhi, the UAE, UK, US and Singapore. (More on the event later.)

So the lead-up to D-Day (on Boxing Day) was a nonstop flurry of introductions to my new relatives, me cajoling them for their recipes for their most delicious dishes (I've had some success, so stay tuned!), plunging into the bowels of Crawford Market in Mumbai and Commercial Street in Bangalore to procure fabric for shalwar khameez (Punjabi suits) and saris and Kashmiri shawls and all the accompanying bangles and sandals and purses (oh my), trips to the tailor to get said Indian outfits made, getting my hands henna-ed up for the first time, and multiple late-night airport runs to pick up loved ones flying in from far away.

*Exhale"

Well. And a fresh tender coconut and pomegranates bursting with rubies of every shade of purple, red and pink every day. And briyani. Oil-tankers full it. Enough briyani to feed and fatten all of India and then some for lunch the day after.

*Burp*

It occured to me at some point that this was my first Christmas ever away from home in Singapore. Away from Mum's turkey. An uncle's home-baked ham. An aunt's Hockchew wonton soup. Another aunt's fried beehoon (rice noodles) and lohr ak (braised duck). A cousin's attempt at sushi. Grandma's delectable agar jellies. About 100 aunts, uncles, cousins and their children all trying to remember each other's names. And then there are friends. Rubbing elbows with them while having the one-th too many cocktail. Bumping knees with them waiting for Christmas service to be done.

Instead, for Christmas lunch this year I find myself at Sundeheri at Woodlands Hotel in Bangalore, tucking into a vegetarian thali of (clockwise from top left below) carrot, lentil and coconut salad, coconut and red chili chutney, okra fried with coconut, spiced taro, mallow with lentil, yellow dhal, puri (diabolical deep fried dough pillow cases) and eggplant curry. All served -- in the proper old school South Indian way -- on a banana leaf.

It's all terribly tasty, and I do have Mum and Dad in from Singapore at the table, but it still doesn't feel like Christmas. I guess for me Christmas needs to be spent around not just a familiar set of people (that's some of you reading this), but also a familiar set of food. And -- as much as I hate to admit it -- a playlist of saccharine-sweet Christmas jingles. Just a few. The limit being remix version 4 of "Last Christmas" by Wham!.

This New Year will be spent in Hyderabad, attending Babs's sister-in-law's cousin's wedding. Far away from the New Year's Eve party I've hosted each year since 1995, which I've missed only once before in 2003, when I spent a poorly-thought-out week running around Eastern Europe, filling my lungs with icicles which took a couple of months after to properly dislodge. My sinuses have never been the same since.

Ah well. Nothing like stepping out from the routine of home to make you appreciate it all the more.

I hope you'll continue to drop by here in 2010. Babs and I will be poking around more of India, Ghana(!), Southeast and Northeast Asia, maybe Australia and New Zealand (depending on our cash situation) and South America before we decide where to hunker down and set up camp for the next few years.

In the meantime, my very best wishes to you for the new year. May all our days be delicious ones.

24 December 2009

Mostly because, in the group chat afterwards, when all the wildlife lovers are cooing "Wasn't that majestic... wasn't that just soooo cute..." I will inevitably blurt out "I wonder what that tastes like."

And then a "whoompf" of silence will descend, and everyone will wonder with raised eyebrows wondering "Who brought her?"

Eventually one of the more sociable ones will play along, and the group will discuss what they would and wouldn't eat, and someone will always end up saying "Oh but I couldn't eat that, they're just too cute!"

I've never understood this not eating cute animals business. What does that even mean? They'll eat only ugly schmugly animals? How would animals qualify for the life-saving cute category? If they've done enough Disney roles to qualify for health insurance with SAG?

I tend to think this out loud. More raised eyebrows.

If you're still reading this, and chuckling along, I think we understand each other. Read on. Otherwise, you might want to read some other post. And probably not the one about the Kenyan Goat Feast.

===

So I decided that while we were in Africa, we had to try some game meat. The farmed, rather than endangered variety. (Yes, I will eat cute, but not endangered)

The first and most obvious lead was Carnivore in Nairobi, Kenya, but we found out that Kenya had banned the sale of game meat. (Research suggests that Carnivore also has a branch in Johannesburg, South Africa, which still serves a rotation of game meats.)

Luckily, Long Street in Cape Town, South Africa -- the city's backpacker and entertainment ground zero -- offers 2 delicious and affordable options for those game for game.

Royale Eatery

Hipster-chic Royale Eatery also serves pizzas and very impressive salads, but it is first and foremost a gourmet burger joint, with offerings of beef, chicken, fish and -- what I came for -- ostrich.

South Africa pioneered ostrich farming over 150 years ago, and posh neighbourhoods in ostrich central Oudtshoorn are said to be built upon the feather fortunes. Today, vehicle manufacturers still buy ostrich feathers to be used in the late stages of the vehicle-painting process. Ostrich hides are turned into an array of leather products, eggs are made into monster omelettes and their shells painted and sold as decorations.

Ostrich meat, as it turns out, is a red meat. The best way to describe its taste? You know how Diet Coke tastes like a subtly different version of regular Coke? Ostrich -- similar to kangaroo but with a different twang -- tastes like diet beef. Lovely flavour and bite, with much less of the heaviness afterwards.

The beetroot chutney was a lovely lift to the taste and colour of the well made burger platter. The sweet potato fries were superb, especially with aioli, and sweet chili sauce.

Do also sample Royale Eatery's formidable milkshake menu. I took a shot at the Jack Daniels and Peanut Butter shake. Geeeeeenius. Even more genius than the time I chucked some JD into my 7-Eleven Coke slurpee. I should experiment with chucking JD into more stuff. Recommendations?

Khaya Nyama (House of Meat)

Khaya Nyama, which specialises in game meat, is open only for dinner and describes its ambience as "bushman cave". I guess that means this.

To sample a range of game without committing to an expensive steak portion of something you might not like, try the venison carpaccio platter, with a slice of crocodile, ostrich, springbok and kudu (2 kinds of deer).

The 3 red meats, while very tasty, posssibly had too much spices and brine to really bring out the differences between the different meat flavours. The more interesting experience was the crocodile. It looks mostly like a slice of smoked chicken or turkey, but has that slight translucent sheen of fish. Its taste had the same unusual fishy-chickeny combination.

I followed with a whopping serving of grilled warthog ribs. As somewhat expected, it tasted like a more full bodied version of pork (a beefier version of pork?). Lovely. The sides -- maize mash, broccoli, and rice, were hearty but could probably do with slightly prettier plating to match up with the restaurant's fine dining pitch.

19 December 2009

"Cross the bridge... follow the detour for 4km... look for the church and the school... look for the turnoff 1.2km from the school... go 1.5km... past the neighbour's farm... left at the fork... then go to the end of the road."

We were on a treasure hunt for Fynboshoek Cheese, a South Africa Garden Route locavore haven by award winning cheesemaker Alje van Deemder, who has been personally serving lunches for more than a decade, with just about everything served being grown and / or made onsite.

I trust this is the right way...

Success! We drive up to a mustard house garlanded with many a flowering tree, and get ushered into a breathtaking sunroom, where classical music is softly playing. If they had divans here I could dawdle with a book for many afternoons on end.

There's no menu at Fynboshoek. (The set lunch costs ZAR 110 per person. Drinks are extra.) So we wait, soaking in the view. Then the opening act arrives, with quite a bang: Fried goat cheese canapes, with a dab of jam and sprigs of fresh thyme.

Next, salad caprese, with a sunny homemade mozzerella. And rosemary focaccia, fresh from the oven. Combine with a giant bowl of vibrantly coloured salad leaves for a soul-cleansing gorge.

The headline act: The Fynboshoek cheese platter, with 3 goat cheeses of varying maturity, a couple of cheddars, a smoked provolone ball, and my favourite (on the far left) a cow's milk cheese with cumin. Not being a class-A curd nerd, I sometimes find the taste of goat cheese to be too overwhelming, but the ones put forward here were gentle and gorgeously creamy.

I've never had a meal of cheese, bread and leaves this satisfying.

You can read about the health and environmental merits of eating locally -- where ingredients are grown and sourced from as close to the dining table as possible -- but it's so much more seductive to experience the difference with all five senses.

Out bread was finger-singeing hot, with salty dough and rosemary wafting about the table. The salad leaves were surprisingly sweet, having been spared nitrogen and that awful bitter plastic infusion that comes with supermarket packaging. If you have time after lunch, you can go stroll on the grounds outside the house, and say hello to the goats and cows that provided the milk for your cheese.

The other diners in the sunroom and at a long table outside were quite uniformly of the pastel shirt and shoulder-slung sweater and posh leather loafer variety. So Mr van Deemder -- possibly pleasantly surprised by the diversity of a scrubby Chinese and Indian couple -- tarried over expressos, asking what we were doing way out here in Tsitsikamma.

He was quite amused with our casual quest of eating our way around the world, and he visibly perked up when we said we focused especially on eateries that showcased local ingredients and traditional recipes. We shared laments about how so much of South Africa's best produce (especially seafood) is sent overseas while locals lap up cheaper but lower quality imports. I told him about our frustrated quest to sample Knysna oysters, and he rejoined: "Our squid and cuttlefish is top quality, so it all goes to Europe and Asia. All the squid you find here is from South America."

Tragedy! How does one hijack a South African squid boat I wonder...

The music switches to a jaunty ragtime jazz tune. Do we really have to go?

But I take heart. Fynboshoek is that kind of treasure trove that is more likely to keep keeping on if you spread, rather than hoard, the word. So go. Off-map, off-GPS, to where cheese marks, and hits, the spot.

Fynboshoek Cheese
Off the N2 Highway across from Tsitsikamma Lodge
Calling ahead for reservations and directions is essential
+27 42 280 3879

15 December 2009

How ever the town of Arusha, Tanzania may pitch itself to the world (one reference is apparently "The Geneva of Africa") it is in essence a pit stop. Arusha is where travellers from all over the world break their journey on the overland route between Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam (as we did in late October), or else camp for the night before forging onward to Serengeti National Park or Mount Kilimanjaro.

As such, Arusha's streets are chockablock with buses, safari vans and giant SUVs owned by flush tour operators. And hungry pedestrians in transit.

One enterprise that has embraced this situation with some delicious genius is wheeler mealer Zubeda Auto Spares / Khan's Barbeque. By day, it sells auto parts to vehicles trundling through town. By night, it sells some of the best damn Pakistani-style BBQ chicken parts I've tasted anywhere for the travellers pouring out of said vehicles.

Slot yourself into one of the long bench tables (or simply lower your SUV window if you want to eat in your plush vehicle), place your order, then go build your own salad that comes with each meal. I particularly liked the green tomato achar (pickle) salad.

Beware: this is one of the few eateries in East Africa where when they tell you something is spicy, they mean it's spicy (I learned this the hard teary-sweaty-snotty way).

The other thing the more sensible among you need to be aware of, is that 1 order of chicken at Khan's means 1 whole chicken. We unknowingly ordered 2. Which meant we had the most badass snacks on the bus to Dar Es Salaam the next day.

Twas the proverbial dark and stormy night when we ate at Khan's. In these parts, this often means that power cuts out for hours on end.

So while waiting for Khan's backup generator to kick in, we dined by Maglite and SUV headlight... same way the grill chefs soldiered on.

Having lived in London, I had full appreciation of their stoicism while BBQing in the rain. So we made another pit stop at Khan's on the road back to Nairobi a week later.

As tender, juicy, spicy and smoky as the chicken was, I was glad to be moving on. If Khan's were in my neighbourhood I'd find myself there embarassingly often. Eat frequently enough at a place like this, and you're bound to eventually get a spare tyre for free. And I don't mean the type you can run your car on.

08 December 2009

It was low tide on a November morning at Jambiani village, on Zanzibar's south-east coast. Out into the horizon, women were either bent over picking or walking back to shore with giant sacks of seaweed on their heads. Patches of the stuff were sorted by hue and laid out to dry in front of many of the concrete and coconut-leaf-thatch huts in the village, like bonsai astroturf lawns.

What did they do with so much seaweed?

Our hostel manager said the seaweed was used for food. The dude who took us sailing and snorkelling on his dhow the next day concurred.

Fabulous. A locally foraged delicacy. Get me some-o-dat.

Except our hostel chef looked at me like I was crazy. He asked me how to cook it. How ever the villagers cooked it, I said. He didn't know, he said, he'd never cooked it before. He didn't know anyone here who ate it. Maybe I could show him what to do with it.

But...the manager said...

"No no no we don't eat it," now said the manager. "They sell to Asia. China. Japan. Asia people eat."

Tsk. If anything not fillet-able is coming out of the sea in large quantities, it's probably going to us bloody Asians (ok and maybe the Spaniards). Later in my research I found out the seaweed out here is farmed, not foraged. And it gets sent off to processing centres like Singapore to be turned into agar (vegetarian gelatin) and food stabilisers that go into all sorts of processed food, and toothpaste.

The things that happen to your food right under your nose! I had grown up on Grandma's agar jellies. So this is where they came from. But was brushing my teeth the only way I'd get to taste some seaweed while I was out here at the source?

Another walk the next morning, this time north to Paje. Much more real estate development here, but a similar seaweed scene. All that fresh, crunchy, briny sea-mineral-filled goodness, just going far far away to Asia. Bah.

Out popped this guy on the beach. A Captain Hadji, and a pitch for a fish lunch at his home-restaurant.

How much, I asked, wary of a fat bill no one agreed on after the meal.

7,000 Tanzanian shillings. (~£3.20) Very fresh, he said.

Can we see the fish? Babs asked.

"Fish not here yet," he said. "I wait for fishing boats. High tide they come back. They come, I buy fish, I cook, 30 minutes, lunch."

"Can we come with you to the boats?" I asked.

"Ok, you come, you come," he said.

One last hurdle. A long shot: "Do you know how to cook seaweed? Can we have some? With the fish?"

Captain Hadji chuckled at me.

"You like our seaweed! Yes I know. Yes ok I get some for you."

SOLD.

And so Babs and I sat on the beach and waited for the tide. And sure enough, at noon, the fishing boats came, dragged through the shallows up to shore by their various captains and 1-man crews. Captain Hadji waded out to meet them. Babs and I waded out after him.

No one had nets or lines. Just fishing spears. Little piles on reef fish. One boat had a baby shark. Fwah!

"Ok I have your fish. I go get seaweed. You come at 1pm for lunch," said Captain Hadji.

"Fine. Great," I said, still gawking at the shark.

I was happy to have some fellow gawkers for company onshore. Various villagers came to gather round the 50kg shark, including a blind boy who squatted with it, running his hand along its cool leathery skin and its many pointed teeth.

Then came the next course of entertainment and education. Next to the shark, fishermen from various boats came up with sacks and buckets and emptied out piles upon piles of beautiful giant starfish. Our little patch of Paje turned a gentle acid-trip of technicolour.

What do you do with the starfish? I asked each villager until I found someone who spoke enough English. My heart was clenched, ready to break if they said they sold it as curios to tourists.

I still didn't feel great about what that meant for the coral reef. But it beat putting them on a shelf so that some idiot could brag to their friends about how at one they felt with marine life at some exotic location.

It was 1pm. Time for the main course. Babs and I trooped over to Captain Hadji's porch, soggy, sunburned and starving.

He was just getting to putting the fish on his charcoal grill. It was white snapper and red snapper today, he said. Marinated in salt, pepper, ginger, garlic and lime juice. With rice cooked in coconut milk.

I recognised the spots on the "red snapper". It was actually red garoupa, a premium fish in Chinese restaurants prized for its sweet, delicately flaky flesh. My Dad and I are both mad fans. Good Lord, everything in the water here must be heading for the far east.

Babs and I wolfed everything down, picking through each crevice of the heads, the cheeks and the eyes with surgical precision. Captain Hadji wasn't kidding about "very fresh". I still don't know when I'll get to eat fish this fresh again, barring joining a fishing expedition and cutting up some sashimi or ceviche on the boat.

And he did good on the seaweed. It came stir fried with a little garlic, a little tomato, a touch of masala. Crunchy briny magic. The two Swedish women who had also signed up for lunch didn't get any. They had asked Captain Hadji to remove the fish heads from their lunch, so they didn't deserve any, in my mind. I wish I had overheard them at the time. I would've demanded to rescue their fish heads. I hoped at least this meant Captain Hadji and his family would eat them.

The bill for the fish was as agreed. We both had soda. "Pay what you want for the seaweed," said Captain Hadji.

So we put in 10,000 TZS each. Our best meal in Zanzibar cost us a grand total of £9. The food and the service were both ten out of ten. The ambience, something I don't usually don't pay much attention to... in this case... out of ten... scores... to be conservative... about a million.

06 December 2009

I was delighted when Guardian UK's Been There approached me about writing a guest post about my top 10 eats so far, after 5+ months on the road.

The list in my post"Eating Her Way Around the World" covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and hopefully suits a range of budgets. (Well, except the uber-posh / silly expense account bracket, given my own financial limitations.)

Above all, I focused on a list of eateries that for me captured a sense of place and local flavour.

I hope it's helpful and enjoyable list for all you hungry travellers out there!

02 December 2009

"Okay. So. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being 'Wen you're being an idiot, just stop this nonsense now', and 10 being 'helllllllll yeeeeeeah', where would you say you are?" I asked Babs and Louise, our fabulous host in Dubai.

"Five..." said Babs, "...not that a 1 has ever stopped you."

" 'On a scale?' You are SUCH a geek. Seriously," said Louise. She would know. We used to work together in Singapore.

We were at the poultry aisle in Spinney's, a supermarket chain in Abu Dhabi. In particular, we were all staring at a trough full of frozen Butterball turkeys. It was mid afternoon on Thanksgiving Thursday, and I was testing the momentum behind my crazy idea to throw together an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner out here in the Gulf. If we went through with it, the plan was to buy a turkey now, thaw it in Louise's car outside while we chatted over cake and coffee, and hope for the best come dinnertime. Given I usually defrost turkeys overnight, there was a serious risk of serving up turkey slices for dinner and turkey popsicles for dessert.

But I couldn't just give up now. Not when we had found any turkey at all out here in the desert. I love turkey. I love its dramatic size, carving it, how its clean firm flesh is such a great canvas for gravy and cranberry. I love picking apart the carcass after dinner, gleefully anticipating a week's worth of snacks. I love turning a turkey's lovely bones into a hearty soup or congee. I loved turkey even way back when my family ate store-cooked ones at Christmas, woefully flavourless and so overcooked you choked on its dryness with every mouthful. Back then it wasn't about eating turkey at Christmas dinners, it was about drowning mostly untouched turkey slices in gravy and mozzerella to make a very messy turkey melt for days afterwards.

Then while at university in the US, I got invited to Thanksgiving dinners with various friends' families, and learnt how to cook turkey myself. Pilgrims pillaging the New World notwithstanding, I like the ritual of sitting down with family and friends with a mountain of food, and being thankful for the year's bounty of provision and affection. So I took the tradition with me back home to Singapore, and later to London, converting (or at least feeding) a few friends along the way for whom I am thankful.

A decade on from my first DIY turkey, was I about to break with my adopted tradition?

"Hey look. These turkeys are defrosted already. And they're halal!" said Herbert, our friend based in Abu Dhabi, coming back from further along the aisle.

The key to nailing this recipe is to move like a rockstar. The key to making this recipe your own is to riff like a jazz cat.

On hitting a high note on full phat flavour: Over the last few years Babs and I have experimented with posh trendy fats such as duck fat, goose fat, and beef fat. I still prefer this olive oil and butter mix. But hey, play it your way!

Clockwise from top left: Different riffs on the basic Rockstar Roast Potato recipe -- With garlic and fried skins; with carrots and paprika; bulked up with butternut squash and courgettes and infushed with fresh rosemary; fired up with sliced red chili and cayenne pepper

Add a few generous swigs of olive oil to a large frying pan on medium heat (Babs insists the skins need to be "swimming" in oil)

Add the bay leaves and sliced garlic and fry for a minute

Add the potato skins, and fry for ~20 minutes until crispy

Parboiling the Potatoes

While the potato skins are frying, bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil

Put a pinch of salt and a swig of olive oil to the boiling water

Add the potato chunks and parboil for ~15 minutes. Test by sticking a fork into one of the smaller pieces. It should be soft on the outside but hard on the inside

Rockstar Moves

Drain the water from the potato pot

Add the contents from the frying pan into the pot with the potatoes

Put the lid on, secure firmly, and shake the pot like a rockstar! This will distribute the flavour of the fried potato skins, and bruising the potato chunks will help them crisp their edges while roasting in the oven

Roasting the Potatoes

Preheat oven to maximum heat

Move potatoes from pot to a roasting tray. Create as thin a layer as you can manage for maximum crispiness

Grind salt and pepper evenly throughout the tray

Add any of the following ingredients evenly throughout the tray, depending on how much you want to pimp this up: Small chunks of butter, peeled garlic segments, red chili slices, mixed herbs, cayenne pepper

If additional guests RSVP late and you need to bulk up the dish, add any selection of raw carrots, butternut squash, or courgettes (cut into evenly sized pieces) to the roasting tray

Place in oven and roast for ~30 minutes. Check regularly to watch the thin line between a good crisp and a nasty burn

I've read that Jamie Oliver gives the potatoes a very light mashing and additional butter bastings at each 10 minute mark, to maximise crispness. I leave it to you to decide if the extra effort is worth it.

If you're roasting your own turkey, you're already sitting on a goldmine of gravy, so don't bother buying the supermarket jar variety filled with MSG etc, and don't overfuss this easy and improvisation-friendly gravy recipe.

All you need is a couple of onions, some unsalted butter (preferably organic) and a couple of tablespoons of either white or wheat flour or cornstarch.

If your turkey came with a bag of giblets, boil 1-2 cups of water in a saucepan, place the giblets in the saucepan, and simmer on low heat for as long as the turkey cooks. You want as concentrated a broth as possible without burning the saucepan. If your turkey didn't come with giblets, so be it. No worries.

While your turkey is cooking, thinly slice 1-2 onions

After your turkey is out of the oven and resting on a carving board, heat a dollop of butter in a medium-sized saucepan

Add the onions and fry for 1-2 minutes

Add 1-2 tablespoons of flour and mix in with the onions until evenly distributed. You're much less likely to get lumps this way, compared to adding flour after you've added liquid

Add the drippings from the turkey roasting pan. If you have giblet broth, add this too

Simmer on low heat and stir, as the gravy thickens

To add kick, add a splash of red wine, or whiskey (Johnny Walker Green Label worked a treat last week!)

Add salt and pepper to taste if needed

Fresh Cranberry Sauce

(As dictated to me by Babs, who whipped this up while I was carving the turkey in the dining room)

Put 250g of fresh cranberries in a small saucepan on medium heat

Add "a teeny amount" of boiling water, enough to cover the bottom surface of the saucepan

Add ~3 tablespoons of sugar

Cook until the cranberries soften (less than 10 minutes) and stir regularly

I've experimented with various recipes over the 10 years I've been cooking my own turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I've done melted butter and red wine injections, wrapped the turkey in bacon, stuck butter and herbs between its skin and its meat, even left it to soak overnight in a Nigella turkey spice bath. For me anyway, the extra faff didn't produce a disproportional improvement in taste, so I keep coming back to this simple recipe.

Place turkey in roasting tin. If your turkey has wingtips, wrap these in foil so they don't burn

Douse 1 mug of orange juice on the turkey and inside its cavity

Create a mixture of salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika -- enough to rub a generous amount all over the surface of the turkey as well as inside its cavity

Cut the apples into chunks and stuff inside the turkey's cavity

Wrap the roasting tin tightly in foil, so that the moisture in the roasting tin can keep circulating

Cooking the Turkey

Place turkey in preheated oven and cook for 90 minutes

Remove foil, baste the turkey with the drippings, add the 2nd mug of orange juice if necessary

Return turkey to the oven, WITHOUT the foil, so that the breast can brown. Cook for an additional 30-45 minutes

Note: Cooking time will need to be extended if you're cooking a larger bird, cooking other dishes in the oven at the same time, or have additional stuffing in the turkey

To check if turkey is cooked through, make a small incision in the breast and/or in the thigh. Juices should run clear and the meat should not be reddish pink. Return to the oven for another 30 minutes after each check if needed